Humor

Nothing says science like a beetle humping a beer bottle - and it earned Professors Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz a coveted Ig Nobel prize. If you have been living under the science equivalent of a rock, you may not know the Ig Nobel prizes are parodies of the Nobel kind and are presented annually by the Annals of Improbable Research. As they tell it, Gwynne and Rentz were working in Australia two decades ago when they noticed something that has never happened to us, even with the worst beer goggles. "We were walking along a dirt road with the usual scattering of beer cans and…

Here is a song called "I Am A Squid" sung to the tune of Simon&Garfunkel's "I Am A Rock." It is awesome. That is all. (I got a bit bogged down over the weekend with the process of migrating my other blog from Movable Type to Blogger. I must say I find the Blogger interface at least 60% more user-friendly, although the impossibility of importing images en masse is a tad frustrating. As far as I can tell, though, no one has that figured out. /tech rant)

Maybe they stopped by Starbucks for a little faster-than-the-speed-of-light pick me up.

. . . and I just learned a new nickname for Doryteuthis opalescens, thanks to the Redondo Beach Patch. Market squid is referred to as "candy bait" because of its effectiveness on so many different species. Now I'm envisoning a series of adorable cartoon squids: the Candy Cane Squid, the Saltwater Taffy Squid, the Chocolate Covered Squid, the Licorice Twist Squid. Well, what do you know, at least one of these has already been illustrated: by kathleenkathleen And yes, that's what I mean when I call squid the "snacks of the sea." Every marine critter out there loves to eat them!

Twitter, in its quest to supplant Facebook among literate people and stave off a threat (or not) from GooglePlus, seems to have recently made some changes to its image utility - namely, you can now see images you have Tweeted before. That's good.  Maybe it has been around for a while, I have no clue, I never use the actual Twitter.com interface because it is horrid.   Yet GooglePlus is pretty terrible also and they do not have an open API yet, which basically put Twitter on the map, because the user base could improve the Twitter experience by bypassing it.   No one can figure…

I was meandering around the internet during the holiday weekend, catching up on RSS feeds and the like, and found this comic by David Coverly: It reminded me of something from a few weeks ago - I was nosing around in a box of decades-old memorabilia while visiting with my grandparents, and saw what I thought was a note written by my mom. Given that it was a rather racy collection of items from their weekends away from their 10 children,1 I asked Mom about it, and it turned out to be a note written by my grandpa - their writing is nearly identical. My writing is nearly identical to my dad…

Police blotters can make fun reading, especially when they show up in your news alert for "squid," and especially when they use the word "caper": The caper began when someone used blue spray paint to draw a large squid or octopus on the northwest side of the Warner Park Community Recreation Center, 1425 Troy Drive. Squid or octopus? Why didn't they call a marine biologist to identify it? Anyway, a few days later the police were investigating the suspect of a hit-and-run crash in his house: While making the call, one noticed a sketchbook on the living room table. It was open to a page that had…

I am not a big fan of re-posting others' stuff, but this gem seems to be hard to get and it is not just funny, but actually true, meaning that if you are for example an undergrad and you want to know how the postdoc feels about you, here is your answer. Of course, the PI sees only the female undergrads that way (if they are male and straight), but nevertheless, yes they do! And the one with the postdoc perceiving the technician: the technician is the one telling the secret, the postdoc is the one whose eyes are opened. Sure - this is biased from a technicians perspective, but their…

Came across this video of comedian Louis CK on Letterman, where he argues that we should add lions as selection pressure on human beings. In his words:    “I think human beings are still evolving and we’re all responsible for that. There’s nothing less than the human evolution at stake when you act like an idiot. And If you are idiot then you should be selected out. Not by a committee, but by lions…” It's an interesting point overall, though. We are increasingly changing our environments, and, in doing so, also the selective pressures that act upon us. Enjoy.

My car Runs On Snake Oil There are far too many people trying to con money out of ordinary people with offers of gadgets that will supply you forever with free energy. ... we're a wee bit skeptical of anyone who claims to have made a miraculous scientific breakthrough, refuses to explain said scientific breakthrough, and then asks you to cut them a check.http://www.engadget.com/ I was checking who is linking to what in my stats, and that's how I came across this, so a hat tip to Village of the Banned aka Not the [Word removed at the request of Steorn] Forum for making me aware of this…